rakesh

Ted Rheingold, Dogster’s founder and “Top Dog” speaks at FOWA

Ted’s talk was one of the best at the Future of Web Apps conference last week. His talk was entitled “The State, Future & Business of Passion-centric Online Communities” and he spent half the presentation (or maybe less) talking about Dogster and Catster and general guiding principals for passion-centric online communities. And the last half or so of the presentation was dedicated to a review of 20-30 different such communities– the latter part was awesome, a lot of fun and a great survey of online communities.

Ted also touched on how he believed communities would exist wherever there members are and that accordingly, you’d see them everywhere from mobile phones, to DVRs, PDAs, mobile game devices, and so on. This is something that I’ve always believed (something that’s reflected in some of the newer things that we’re doing at SnapStream) and Ted’s the first I’ve heard reinforce this notion.

My notes…

Ted Rheingold – Founder / Top Dog
blogs: blog.dogster.com & spideysenses.com

Passion-centric Whats
– passion centric online communities are spaces dedicated to a single particular interest
– they usually include human profile sharing, posting of passion-specific items and offer member-to-member and member-to-group communication possibilities

Other likely feautres
– design, copy, and UI that only refelct the site user’s passion, they amplify it
– moderation is key: a community is a garden and that needs sincere consistent care
– clearly stated ground rules that are community initated and community approved
– precised and considerate safety policies with lots of opt-in/opt-out

Sincerity cannot be faked
– people’s passions do not fit into silos
– using topic agnostic community software will rarely captivate your commnity
– if you ignore your community at any time for any length they will feel it and look elsewhere

Dogster & Catster’s frontpages:

(single code base, every cat word is specific — cats naps, dogs do tricks)
(regular cat page, samoa… blue ribbons, only subscribers can give blue ribbons and they disappear after 30 days — came straight from the forums)
(like locker in high school)
(profile pages are completely customizable)
(meet her feline friends)

Forums
– custom coded, don’t have to register to other forums

Dogster
– diary central, 36,000 dogs keeping diaries, most all of them are writen from the standpoint of the pets
————————–
Aggregate data
20.5 million virtual treats given
7.6 million distrinct friendships
289,000 dog and cat profiles
252,000 human members
50,000 pets keep diaries
16k logins yesterday
————————–
Da’ Biz
Not too many revenue options

– advertising and sponsorships (3rd party ads, affiliate programs and bounties rarely pay more than your expenses)
– subscription programs: a good goal is that the commmunity should be able to support it’s own existence
– selling member-made or site specific items: even better way than memberships fees for community to support itself
————————–
How to make advertising work
– keep your ad sales inside no one will be able to voney your memeber’s passion better than yourself (bring it in and your numbers will increase 10 fold)
– advertisers need to have a direct connection to the communities passions
– CPM is almost dead, for an advertisers message to be heard deliver it in the site voice and in place swhere members are receptive to messaging
– require advertisers to offer something real to the community. something that requires them to participate and become trusted

(if you are doing well, $8 CPM, 3rd party services get down to $0.10 – $0.25 CPM)

————————–
Circle of Trust
Dogster -> Community -> Advertisers ->

(community should like the product, advertiser should be happy)

————————–
Future of passion-centric online communities

– for every passion there will be a dedicated’ster’ and there can easily be more than one popular ‘ster’ passion
– there will be tens of thousnads of pasion-centric online communitiesi in 10 years
– public APIs badges and mini-sites widgets will bring communities to where the mbmber already is
– public/open ID system will be used
– the web is just the launchign point, think cell phones, mms, pdas, console-gaming, hand-held games (PSP/DS), DVRs, car-based computers, communities will meet where their members are

————————–
DeviantArt — started in 2001
35 people
2+ million members
25 milliions pages serves / day
alexa: 177, google PR 7/10
18k online at one point in time
community mood
besides subscription, they sell prints that people make
revenues from subscriptions and orders of member art

ettiquette policy: this is not about being a jerk
————————–
amateur illustrator (based in England, brand new)
————————–
CNet — alot of community in it, amazing job in bringing in advetrisers into the community
————————–
PopSugar — blogging site with interesting products for hip people, make a profile on there, blog, comments, bookmark all your favorite items
————————–
Model Mayhem
Alexa 3896, Google PR 3/10

Models and photographers only
amazing set of rules: no pornography, no GWC (guys with cameras)

————————–
major league gaming
– halo and microsof tgames
– they have a tv shows
– hour long visitor sessions in 2004
– president: michael sepster
– website is just to bring people in and make them happy
————————–
Yahoo Autos
– people add photos of their car
– deep integration, photos, features, modifications
————————–
Edmunds — Carspace
– old company, trying to make a stir
– try to find the word car — it’s not there very much, not good
– lagging behind on alexa
– forums: are boring, “talk about your car”, too much advertising

————————–
boompa— car site from cnet
– your garage online
– add your ride
– random ride, battles
– must better than the edmunds site
– ask the community

– browse guides by categories or model
————————–
faniq: all about sports people
– college or university, good job of replicating a sports fan environment
– every team that has to elect a commissioner
————————–
Feelingbullish.com
– one of the few that’s wokring on a reputation system (has been elusive to deploy, lot of ways to game it)
– stock fan site, get people to stick by their picks and earn your reputation accordingly

————————–
Social picks— putting a faec behind investments
————————–
MyBlogLog
– people who have read my blog recently
– messages below– two lines of javascript that I put on every page
– 30boxes
————————–
Famster
– sharing families online
– “safe, fun and free”
– the safest way to share on the Internet
– can’t get a good feel for them
– could be huge in China (?)
————————–
TheFamilyPost
————————–
Club Mom
Alexa: 11,105
GooglePR: 4/10
Funding to date: $50M
– they are killing with advertising, but they started during web1.0
————————–
Minti is a baby site
– frontpage is a mess which is fine
– I could see 30 baby sites being successful
————————–
Teachade
– share workplan, calendars
————————–
Craftster.org
————————–
VampireFreaks.org
– goth enthusiast sites
600,000 members
Alexa: 4,105
Google PR: 5/10
2-3k members online anytime
4+ million forum posts
backgorund color is black, links are purple
“fuck the mainstream”
page is probably not w3c compliant (ha)
————————–
YourClimbing
— made with Drupal
— person on the homepage
YourMTB.com
– first site for this
– upload photos, videos, etc.
– you register and we’ll give you a free bumper sticker
————————–
EveryTrail
————————–
CuteOverload
– new realm of community
– using blogging software
– ‘commenting is community’
– they won a webby
– they use ning– topic agnostic — for “caption me”
————————–
search on ‘cats’ in Google– two communites in the top 10 hits
AboutCom’s Cats
————————–
Cats in Sinks
————————–
Stuff on my cat
————————–
CatsThatLookLikeHitler.com

Kitlers– cats that look like hitler

(photograph above by Scott Beale and hosted on flickr)

Notes from Michael Arrington’s talk at Future of Web Apps

I arrived a few minutes late to Michael Arrington’s talk, but caught most of his presentation in my notes (see below). Mike’s the editor of TechCrunch, the hub for a lot of the enthusiasm and news coverage around Web 2.0, and he’s one of the self-appointed spokesman and evangelists for this new generation of web companies… which is a absolutely a good thing IMO. From my notes at Gnomedex, Mike’s measure of success for an internet company is 1) it makes money and 2) it makes the Internet a better place. My notes from his talk last week…

Pretty good bets

(missed this slide altogether)

Ones to watch

– 1-800-free-411

(missed most of this slide)
What were they thinking?

– inform
– gather
– pubsub
– browzar (wonderful coverage on techcrunch UK, bbc, nytimes)–> about a week later and people looked closer at it and realized that it was just a wrapper to internet explorer
– jigsaw: 7000 new people coming into the site every day, one of Michael Arrington’s best friends is on the board of austin ventures; companies like this shouldn’t exist, Mike believes that we should have regulation in place to prevent companies like this from coming into existence)
– squidoo

– Purple Cow: must read book
– broken revenue model from the beginning
– put ads up and then you get a revenue cut

(be careful with what you promise people when you launch)

Shared attributes of winners

– passion for what they are doing (opposite of this: don’t over business plan)
– do something extraordinary (purple cow)
– removing serious friction
– great founder dynamics
– never raised big money or raised it after they won
– perfect revenue model not required
– and… luanched their copmany with a post on techcrunch

Shared attributes of losers

– poor founder / team choices
– lifestyle / ego entrepreneurs
– raised too much money (may or may not be sign of a bubble)
– spent too much money
– over business-planned
– forgot about scaling (friendster)
– didn’t launch their company on techcrunch (ha)

What server platform?

– PHP (most popular)
– Ruby on Rails (upcoming)
– Java (serious applications)
– .NET

What client platform?

– .Net ActiveX (no firefox)
– AJAX (monster)
– Flash (growing)
– XUL/XAML (interesting)
– Adobe Apollo (flash applications that aren’t running in a browser)

– with an apollo application there would be no break between a local application or an online application

– Desktop hybrid

Market saturation
AVOID:
– social networking (socialzr)
– social bookmarks (switched away from delicious… but after reviewing 20 of them)
– video (250 video sites now… many of them are funded)
– photos
– blogging/podcasting platforms
– portals / homepages
– feed reeders

BIG POTENTIAL
– Platforms
– Desktop apps
– Office efficiency
– Cloud storage (microsoft and google launching next year, omnidrive, box.net)
– Identity (rapleaf is a company I love)
– Developer tools
– Market destruction
– ENTERPRISE

– typically enterprise innovations happened and then it came to consumers
– hasn’t happened recently– blogs, voip, instant messaging, online storage
– new enterprise blog from techcrunch– dan farber is writing

Note: The best entrepreneur’s avoid this type of advice. Invent a new market.

(photograph above by Thomas Hawk, hosted here on flickr)

Apple’s iTV’s announcement on Valleywag

I want to write something detailed and thoughtful about Apple’s iTV announcement last week (Apple finally announced a product for the television!), but until then, Valleywag wrote a funny comparison of Apple’s plans for the iTV (expected to cost $299) to an A/V cable (costs $14.60 and eligible for super saver shipping).

Reminds me of Streamzap’s product that lets you “Blast MP3s Through your Stereo!”, their dazzling MP3 Hookup product.

Daddy got a new Tablet PC! (aka my first impressions of my new Toshiba Portege M400)

My daughter plays with my new Toshiba Portege M400 Tablet PC laptop (after eating a chocolate cupcake… mmm)

I just purchased a new Toshiba Portege M400 Tablet PC laptop… As far as the Tablet PC goes, I’m a long time listener, first time caller. That is the say that I’ve followed the Tablet PC for some time both in the news and in reviews and from people I know who have one and have considered getting one on several occasions, but until now I never took the step to actually own one.

Here are some of my initial impressions — warning they are going to be a bit scattered, but I’m hoping to capture some of my first thoughts while they are fresh and haven’t been erased by… whatever it is that leads many of to quickly adapt to new gadgets and new interfaces.

As you can see above, my daughter loves it already. Really, though, she took very naturally to it. It was cool, she thought she was on her chalkboard so she tried to rub off her scribblings using her thumb. 🙂 On a side note, Shonali and I both became afraid, almost at the same time, for every other screen in our house. We need to teach her early and quickly that she can only write on Daddy’s laptop screen… and that too, only with a special pen.
The first things that I find myself doing with this new device are the normal things I do with any PC. Login to GMail to plough through work emails (I just whittled my inbox from 275 messages down to 75… someday I’ll learn my lesson about leaving the office and heading to a conference with extremely engaging speakers for 3 days), listen to voicemails, download some photos from my camera. And unfortunately none of those apps really support my new laptop’s special capabilities (ie the Tablet PC side of things). Right away, I want to use the pen everywhere, I want to be able to draw on everything, make circles, notes, annotations and I can’t. The broad success of this thing is going to be around getting the right set of applications on a box and making them all very pen friendly. Maybe there’s a good pen layer for Office and that might help, but for folks like me that spend so much of their time on the web, in the cloud, there has to be deep pen integration in those apps / website too. A Firefox Tablet PC plug-in? I’ll have to look into it, it’s something I think I’ll almost certainly want. OneNote and Windows Journal? Well, those seem to be THE pen apps, and I haven’t spent anytime in them yet.
The thickness of the Toshiba Portege M400 is a put-off when it’s being used in Tablet mode with the pen. I usually rest my wrist on the paper/table when I’m writing (I think most people do, right?) and having my wrist elevated by 1.5″ makes it awkward to write. Maybe I’ll adjust, but it’s a big put-off to begin with.
Toshiba has this annoying pop-up that appears, by default, everytime you even slightly move the machine that tells you that Toshiba’s anti-shock technology has detected that your laptop is moving and to prevent any damage, it’s parking the hard drive heads. And you have to click it to clear it. Talk about a total put-off to the initial pen experience. I picked the laptop up from the desk and put it in my lap and started writing and every 2 seconds I had to clear this pop-up. I finally said, “don’t show me this message again” but shouldn’t that pop-up just be off by default? I mean, haven’t hard drives been automatically parking their own heads since the mid to late 1980s?
There’s a little bit of “wobble” in the Tablet PC screen when it’s in regular laptop mode. It feels like there should be some way to lock it into laptop-mode position, but there isn’t. In contrast, when I swivel the screen around and lay it flat to put it into tablet mode, the screen snaps securely into the base and the whole thing feels really solid.
There are these funny buttons on the bottom of the screen — I wonder what those are all about? One’s a joystick that kind of acts like the scroll wheel and when you press it you click.
When I’m in tablet mode, I miss my keyboard.
The smaller screen and keyboard (I’m using a Dell 300m right now) are a bit annoying, but I remember switching from my Dell X200 up to the 300m and being amazed at how much nicer the larger keyboard was so this is probably just the reverse of that effect.
I wish the screen was higher resolution, but I probably should have thought of that before I purchased this thing 🙂 Seriously though, I could see a higher resolution display paying more dividends than anything else.
Fan is kind of loud
As I read in a few reviews before buying the M400, switching from laptop mode into tablet mode can take a couple of seconds — it’s not immediate.

I’ll post more comments as I dig into the pen functionality of my new PC. At the moment, “a drawing pad for Ananya” is the best story I can tell about this thing.

The road to Google Calendar (talk by Carl Sjogreen of Google)

Carl Sjogreen delivered an extremely informative talk about how they built Google Calendar. He covers everything from the initial customer interviews and research, to the vision they established for the product, the development iterations they went through, the launch and post-launch reflection. I had a couple of questions that there weren’t time for and I’ve thrown those in the end in case Carl comes across this and can answer then.

Here are my detailed notes…

——————–

How did we build Google Calendar?

Quick Demo

Manage your own personal schedule and share it with other people

Moved a lot of desktop metaphors and moved them to the web. Invested a lot in this.
Also invested a lot in natural language (quickadd)
Also focused a lot on sharing

In the beginning…

– a largely classic Google product team
– 1 product manager and 3 engineers
– Origin was from both customer feedback and internal interest
– Seemed like a space with little innovation — nothing out there was “right” –> exactly the kind of opportunity Google looks for

Okay now I’ve got a team and a vague idea: “Google should do something in the Calendar space” What next?

———-

The Road to Google Calendar: Talking to Customers

– First thing’s first — go talk to “real” customers
– sounds cliche but it’s amazing how little it’s really done
– real customers, not your silicon valley geek buddies
– Spoke to many people, sometimes even in their homes
– students, families, schools, working couples, PTA organizers
– tried to find a whole spectrum of different technical backgrounds
– keep probing: busy is not the same as “needs a calendar”
– Key themes emerged quickly:
– Calendars are necessary but just a chore
– calendars are personal and emotional
– calendar “collaboration” is just too hard

—

I interview a lot of product managers and one of my favorite interview questions is: How do you go from an idea to a product? One of the things that a lot of people miss is establishing a vision. This is the thing that says that if we don’t get anything else right, this is what we’re going to do well.

Our Vision

– Set out to build a calendar that works for you
– fast, visually appealing and joyous to use
– drop dead simple to get information into the calendar
– more than boxes on a screen (reminders, invitations, etc.)
– easy to share so you can see your whole life in one place

– Designed for a consumer world where not everyone has a calendar (or one on the same system)
– open APIs (import and publish)
– invitations for everyone

————————–
The Road to Google Calendar: Development

– Vision in hand, we set off to turn an idea into reality

– Lots and lots of prototyping
– PHP, MySQL, no Google infrastructure
– relatively easy to get basic system up and running: details are hard
– focused on getting interactions and user model right before thinking about scale (a significant challenge for us)

– Internal Use: Pros & Cons
– Got a ton of great feedback from other Googlers
– Got the interaction basics right & generated a lot of feature ideas
– However, keep in mind that your early user might be not your target users

————————–
Once we felt we had it mostly right, worked on making it real
– backend infrastructure designed for scale (ie “Google Infrastructure”)
– front-end / UI rewrite to pixel perfect mocks + static HTML
– doing all the hard parts (recurrences, parsing icals, API testing, interop, etc.)

Worked on our UI design in stages as well
– Get the interactions down and try them out
– Focus on the look & feel while engineers are making it real
– Save the pixel pushing (fine alignment on the user interface) for when you know you have it right

————————–
Private betas are a good thing
– Even with all of our internal testing we learned a ton from testing with a small group of “real users”
– Quickadd improvements (being smart isn’t always the best)
– Underestimated the importance of import
– Fixed a bunch of issues with SMS alerts (tough to test because of all the carriers)
– Better support for small screens (screen density was really important)

Launch day: 4/12/2006
– Flipped the switch, and didn’t sleep for the next 36 hours!

6 key insights that might be useful for your next product or company

1. Easy is the most important feature
– “simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible” ALan Kay, Disney
– Always have an eye on the minimum useful feature set that most people will use
– talk to grandma in NYC
– a mother loved quickadd (& then prints out the calendar for the fridge)
– Product usage tracks directly to how easy a feature is to find & use
– creating calendars = easy
– finding calendars = not easy enough
– Figure out what you absolutely have to get right and relentlessly refine it
– Redesigned the “event page” at least 3 times
– Kept adding new ways to get events into the system up until days before we launched
– Don’t spend too much time on less importnat area
– Know where you’ll get the most bang for the buck

2. Know your real competition
– know what your real competition does well
– we spent a lot of time looking at the market — online and desktop
– but the competition that keeps me up at night is paper
– ~6 billion people in the world, all who have things going on in their lives
– ~300 billion desktop calendars

– Non-tech and low-tech mechanisms are the way that most people communicate and interact
– email vs. evite
– notepad vs. tada lists
– the ktichen calendar vs. google calendar

– paper has a bunch of great advantages that you need to beat
– easy to carry with you
– doesn’t require boot time
– doesn’t require a login

– focus on removing the hurdles to adoption
– import, offline, mobile, etc.
– mimic the flexibility of paper

– focus on what the web can do that paper can’t
– collaboration
– access from anywhere

3. Visual design matters
“Great Design” it’s that ineffeable quality that certain incredibly successful product have that makes people fall in love with them desptie their flaws.” –Joel Spolsky
– great design = usability + visual joy
– ipod vs. everyone else

4. Build products for people who don’t want to use them

– Not everyone who can benefit from your service actually wants to use it
– change behaviour and workflows are very hard
– Need to make it as easy as possible for people to use your product with as little work as possible
– Get your product in front of the applications people use every day
– And then make it painless for peopel to start using your product without fully switching into a new way of doing things
– Google Personalized Module is a great way to get traffic, by the way… they get a ton of traffic from there.

5. Timing launch properly

– launch early and often is the mantra of web companies
– it IS a fundamental structural differences that sets web companies apart from packaged software
– However the old adage of “you can only launch once” still applies
– leverage internal testing and private betas to get feedback early, but…
– make sure that you have something worthwhile once you land on digg / techcrunch / etc.
– launching is hard to do (it’s never an easy call)
– in our case, expectations were very high
– should we have waited for sync for example
– ask yourself if you could really …

6. Driving usage
– We have a steady rate of new users signing up daily with very little marketing
– How? Made it easy for there to be touchpoints everywhere. (buttons on 3rd party sites, send invites, etc. : many touchpoints))
– Think about how your product can generate touchpoints that eten beyond your app[ (and make iteasy to do so)
– social reinforcement is key for validation
– relentlessly remove account sign-ups
– this is pretty obvious but it was surprising to me how much of a barrier accounts can be

———————

My questions

— WHAT PERIOD OF TIME DID THIS SPAN?
— HOW MANY PEOPLE OVER THE SPAN OF THE PROJECT?
— HOW WERE DECISIONS MADE ON UI?
—WERE THERE OTHER PRODUCT MANAGERS LIKE YOU THAT WERE RESPONSIBLE FOR PORTIONS OF THE EXPERIENCE?

Steve Olechowski of FeedBurner talks RSS

My notes from the Feedburner talk (given by Steve Olechowski) aren’t exhaustive like some of my other notes, they are limited to the things that I found interesting:

10-15% of videocast/podcast are video

interesting things going on with feeds, lots of growth… 20M subscribers, 500k feeds under management by Feedburner

consumer device can really drive things — iTunes with podcasting set off feedburner managed podcast and videocast managed feeds

more text in my feed = more total traffic

feeds are a place unto themselves

there are over 3000 RSS clients out there (!)

My Yahoo leads by a large margin as far as number of subscribers (more than 50%) –> Yahoo has done a fantastic job of making RSS a behind the scenes thing. But the tracking here isn’t completely reliable (Google and ____ don’t do things in a way that they can reliably tracked)

RSS is being read on mobile
– 2900 distinct user agents from Nokia, SE and Motorola
– Top 10
– Nokia podcasting client
– Sony Ericsson
– ” ”
– ” ”
– ” ”
– Nokia Onskreen Fusion
– Sony Ericsson
– Nokia 6630
– Nokia N70
– Nokia 6682

Publishers ARE making money with RSS (there were some interesting slides here like how many ad impressions they are generated, I believe they were in the triple sigit millions per month — like maybe last month was something like 146,000,000 impressions)

Notes: Tom Coates talks social software

Tom Coates, Yahoo (also worth listening to is the podcast of Tom’s talk from the London event)

Working for Yahoo in a rapid prototyping unit in London

How people can interact to make something that’s greater than the sum of its parts

MySpace– impressive site, eaten a whole generation of people, easy to take potshots at it but it’s pretty amazing…

Looking up too close at web statistics and at websites is a mistake, have to look at the big picture to see the utility of the whole thing

social software: latest in a long line of cooperative things, goes back to things like the alphabet and writing, justice and government, the invention of money.

(he was a classicist, studied things related to rome and greece)

What is it? It helps us do more together than we could apart.

stated another way: Using software to enhance our social and collaborate abilites through structured mediation

Characteristics, in a nutshell:

When an individual conttributes, they get value

these contributions should provide value to their peers as well

the organization that hosts the service should derive value and be able to expose this back to the user

two models:

1) Consensus: many contributions make one voice (example: wikipedia): Generates canonical or definitive representations in data

openstreetmap.org: response from the bubble community
musicbrainz: about getting new sources of data about music
clear honorable mission is a necessary thing

2) Polyphony: many voices with emergent order (example: flickr): generating a whole lot of material and then manifesting the order in that data, make it comprehensible

works a lot better than the consensus model

– youtube

– delicious

– plazes

– hollywood stock exchange

– last.fm

– amazon.com

Infinite communities, supports a lot of communities not just one: that’s why it works better

MOTIVES: why do people contribute to these sites at all?

friend said there are only two motivations (ha):
– to get laid
– please jesus

Why do people contribute
(Peter Kollack, Economies of Online Collaboration)

anticipated reciprocity

reputation

‘sense of efficacy’

identification with a group, community

Open Source Motives
“Success of Open Source”

Learning to code

Gaining reputation

Scratching an itch

Contributing to the commons

Sticking it to Microsoft

Who and in what context are they contributing…

You can share without really knowing it (example: search engine) (purely utilitarian motive)*

Saving for personal use, but you save in public (example: delicious) (personal utility motive)

Sharing with friends*

Sharing with community interests*

Self expression / showing off**

Altruism / good of the world**

(spectrum: more individual* —- more social/public**)

be wary of clumsy incentives like money, points & competition –> don’t reward the wrong thing, creates gameable and screwed up systems

(points: players who suit MUDs… Richard Bartle, four types of users you have to have to have a MUD. Diamond– achievement, Spades, Hearts:____ ; Clubs: interested in imposition on others, combat with others)

– people might move between these motivations during the life of their existence in a game

– if one of those types of users isn’t rewarded, then the thing comes unraveled –> need a variety of different types of users to create a culture that will last

– example: Digg requires two types of users, one who explores the site and diggs stuff and people who just read pages (and click on ads). If you reward one group but not the other, the sight would come apart.

Building something of collaborative value:
helping people feed back on their own data to build something of lasting value

Last.fm
————————–
Why hasn’t Apple purchased last.fm??

Flickr
————————–
250M photos
all with clear permissions for use
5M of those photos have been geocoded
a vast number of those photos have been tagged
knowledge of which photos are interesting

Open up social value
————————–
expose every axis of data you can
give people place to represent themselves
allow them to associate, connect and form relationships with one another
help them annotate, rate and comment
look for ways to expose this data back onto the site

APIs are cool

Be VERY careful of user expectations around how private or public their contribution is
— Facebook is an example of where someone failed to do this

Be wary of creating monocultures or echo chambers
— digg homepage, don’t make it so that only the same kind of person can use it

Remember: not all of you users ned to participate to generate social value

Business value
————————–
openstreetmap.org (could challenge navteq, mapquest, etc)
flickr.com (making money not by owning data, by 3rd party services)

Attention and advertising
Premium accounts
Building services around the data
Using user-generated annotations and contributions to improve your other services

Rise of aggregate data?
————————–

This is an idea, I need your feedback…

proprietary data own a space
they license their data selectively
increasingly fluid and commoditized services emerge with flat rate-card data provisions
until finally data services generated by distributed commmunities emerge and take over?

Notes from Kevin Rose’s talk about digg.com (at Future of Web Apps summit)

What is digg?

Stories live in the upcoming queues for 24 hours
– Upcoming stories that were dugg by friends are highlighted
– User can identify a store as their #1 story at a particular point in time

My friends
–> filter for upcoming stories

If multiple friends agree on something, then it’s chances of being interesting to everyone goes up a lot so there’s a “shared diggs”

Initial prototype: 20 hours to complete, $10 / hour

$99 a month hosting plan

200+ blog readers

People love to say they hate stuff (ha) –> threshold for comments that have been buried is 4, yet some comments have like 50 or 500 buries!

Give your developers time to experiment with your data (a la Google 20% time)

Today, there are a little more than 500k registered digg.com users
10M+ pages per day
1M+ daily unique visitors
90+ linux boxes

scaling has been a big issue for us
– PDF ‘Inside LiveJournal’s BackEnd’ (bible for us — how to scale and cache a site like this)
– We hired experienced DBAs, the same people who helped friendster, they taught us how to write queries properly.

Be aware of scaling from day 1 or you could have a month (like we did) where it was extremely painful

Future plans
– Learning from users interests story suggestions, friend suggestions
– Digging other types of content online (videos has been the most interesting… third most popular part of the site today)

We have a fully funded business plan
Path to profitability with current ads –> intention is not to do more any more advertising.

Ads provided by Federated Media with extra inventory filled by Google Adsense

People timeline:

just Owen and Kevin –> first four months

$50,000 investment from Text America friends –> hired Owen full-time, move him out here from Toronto

Jay Allison –> convinced him to leave his current company and join Digg full-time as CEO and pursue funding

today, there are 15 people

majority of people are in operations and development

3 full-time PHP people

4 people that help scale the site, DBAs, UNIX admins, experts at netscalers

1 finance guy

1 business dev

1 graphic designer

1 Kevin Rose (product manager)

1 person dedicated to going through all incoming emails

User’s ability to remove their own data –> we’ll be rolling this out in the future
All of your actions belong to you as the user, your attention is something that belongs to you. You’ll even be able to export your data.

Yes, our search sucks –> we have lots of issues with this, we were using mysql’s text search, moving to Lucene. New technology will add the ability to search by number of diggs (yay!)

Paying top users? The most popular content doesn’t necessarily come from top users — very important that there isn’t outside motivation for submitting an article.

“The Emerging Age of Who” talk by Dick Hardt of SXIP

My notes from Dick Hardt’s talk kicked off the Future of Web Apps thing yesterday about identity… it was short talk, only 15 minutes, but it was dense. I loved Dick’s presentation style of speaking without interruption while a stream of synchronized images flowed on the presentation in the background. It’s something I’d love to try myself, I expect that doing it well takes a lot of practice.

Anyways, the notes:

Overview
————————–
What is identity?
Who are you?
Identity 2.0

parable: throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it jumps out right away…
but if you slowly turn up the heat, it just sits there and slowly its dead

If we don’t have identity, it’s like groundhog day –> you start all over every day
credit history, etc –> past behaviour, predictor of future behaviour

digital identity
— lots of online identities, none of them are machine readability

Yahoo
— lots of experiences that are silo’ed, one identity system
— some aberrations like flickr which has an awkward dual login system

Microsoft
— .Net Passport –> name changed to MSN Live Login
— coming up is “Infocard” — this is “Identity 2.0”, it’s good

Google
— bunch of sites most of which are accessible through Google Accounts
— still the same silo thing that Yahoo and Microsoft have going on

eBay
— sepearate accounts — paypal, ebay,
— reputation — past behaviour –> future behaviour (ebay’s “viagra” around their application)
— anti-phishing — starting to do “multi-factor identification”, biometric ID

evolution of identity systems:

domain centric authentication (identity 1.0)
federation of identity systems — circle of trust — silos (identiy 1.5)
circle of trust that scales to the whole globe… need for identity 2.0

opportunities — single account (single point of failure? no, that’s already there… really strong lock in one place)

Wikipedia–> using openID with reputation
slashdot–> “karma”– what if you could take it over to another site?
ebay–> users could present their ebay reputation to another site

infocard, openID are solutions for single account identity

At the Future of Web Applications event

I’m at the Future of Web Apps event in San Francisco’s today and tomorrow. If you are here, give me a shout.

Some brief notes since I left Houston yesterday:

Apple marketing really knows how to hit all cylinders at once with their launch messaging. When I got into SF last night, I saw a billboard on US101 for the new color Nanos and then when I got into the hotel, this e-mail was waiting for me:

I sat next to this guy on the flight from Houston to SFO yesterday who was grad student in bio statistics at John Hopkins in Baltimore. It comes time to eat and they give him a meal and he puts it on his tray but doesn’t actually start to eat it. He’s alternating between looking at his watch and looking at the stewardesses who are a few rows away from serving us drinks. I’m thinking, “This guy really doesn’t want to eat without a drink first!”. Fine, so the drink finally arrives and he gets an iced tea and he specifically asks if he can keep the entire can. Fine, the stewardess says. Then the stewardess says, can I get you anything else for your iced tea — lemon, sugar…? His response, Yes, I’d like a glass of water. !? OK, so now he goes into overdrive organizing everything on his tray, his food tray, his burger, and the two beverages and one can that he has. It looks like he’s doing some feng shui thing with them all on his tray. So he gets them exactly how he likes them and then he reaches down underneath the seat into his bag and pulls out a… camera. He snaps a photograph. At this point, I couldn’t not ask him what was going on. His answer: http://www.airlinemeals.net/. Ha! Wild. He said it was just a sort of hobby for him.